Larry, the community college creative writing professor played by Billy Crystal, listens blankly as a student reads from her submarine story.
“Dive… DIVE,” yelled the captain through the thing. So the captain pressed a button, or something, and it dove. And the enemy was foiled again!”
I've been in my fair share writing classes and workshops. Believe me: this is only a slight exaggeration of the terrible writing one can encounter. Thankfully, I've never met anyone who has written anything as uncomfortable as “100 Women I Would Like to Pork.”
Directed by Danny DeVito, who also co-stars, Throw Momma from the Train works best in these moments and the little quirks of its characters. The main plot, inspired by Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, gets bogged down and isn't as funny as it could have been.
Owen is a student in Larry's class. He lives with his mother (Anne Ramsay), a monstrous woman whom he fantasizes about murdering. Larry's ex-wife (Kate Mulgrew) supposedly ripped off his book and turned it into a best seller, and now Larry has writer's block.
After watching Strangers on a Train at Larry's suggestion, Owen gets the idea to have them swap murders: Owen kills Larry's ex and Larry kills Owen's mother. Naturally, the plan goes awry because Owen is a moron and Larry doesn't really want his ex dead.
The central conceit of Throw Momma from the Train is to take a dark, cynical crime story and have the mastermind be a sweet, dim-witted simpleton. Owen is child-like, easily distracted, and not always clear about what's going on.
When he sneaks into the ex's house to murder her, he has to wait for her to finish a tryst with a beach stud while he hides behind a couch. Bored, he reads a magazine. When Larry finally announces he will murder Momma, Owen asks him to bring him back a Chunky.
His relationship with Momma is something to behold. She's so cruel, she's funny. She berates him, accuses him of minor indiscretions for which she punishes him severely, and comes up with some colorful insults. Larry says it best: she's not a woman, she's the Terminator.
The movie works best when DeVito and Ramsay are on screen. Crystal is essentially the straight man, increasingly hysterical and unhinged. Without DeVito or Ramsay, he's given little to do except freak out, and after a while it grows tiresome, especially after he figures out what Owen's been up to.
The scenes with the police investigating the case, and interviewing Larry's other students don't really add anything or pay off. They're just kind of there, sort of like Larry's new beau Beth (Kim Greist), who all but vanishes from the movie once it gets going.
I wish more of the movie had been about Larry and Owen and the writing class. The murder plot just isn't that strong, and it gets in the way of the funny relationships. Momma could still be there, and Larry could still obsess over his ex, but I was more interested in the naive Owen and the kooky students than I was about whether Larry got arrested
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